Over-thinking a website redesign
It’s the new year and everyone is looking to a fresh start. For web designers, this is a good time to redesign personal websites and online portfolios, and that was what I set out to do.
I realized that I, like most others, have two sides to share with people.
I started considering the reasons for building a personal website, at least my reasons. My website was to be a front for me, a proxy to tell anyone asking about me. I compared it with the real life scenario of meeting someone that wants to know about you. And then I realized that I, like most other people, have two sides to share with people; The more serious side where I’m a designer and nothing else, and the less serious side where I’m a designer yet a fun guy that like to travel and drink with friends and tweet about irrelevancies. And in reality, we decide what side we tell people about based on what they want to know.
I decided to incorporate this into the design for my website. I decided to show content to my visitors based on what they wanted to know about me, while keeping the website copy like a discussion. After a few sketches my homepage turned out like this.
- Happy New Year. To make my website feel more like a conversation I added a greeting paragraph that would change with time. It would say Hello by default, and greet by occassion when there’s one. So by February, the copy will change to Happy Valentine’s day, etc.
- Large Imagery. I used a large picture of me to make the visitor feel my presence, hoping to make it feel more like a conversation with me.
- Menu. The menu is the main thing here. I broke it down into three options on the homepage based on what the visitor actually wants to know about me. This way I can restrict information about myself.
- Contact Info. For people who just want to get across. Noteworthy here is that I didn’t add a bio. I’m saving my bio till I know that the visitor wants to know. Just as a proper introductory conversation will go.
On the work page a bio is included. One that defines me as designer. I used the imagery to corroborate the work and changed the menu options to continue the work related discussion. The phone number and email address still remain.
The bio in this case puts a little more detail into describing me as a person. The imagery is also reflective of the kind of things I like to do. A text slider cycles through the things I like, making the conversation here very less formal. Links to my social media accounts have also been included where they belong–here. On the right also, I used api calls to give the visitor some more detail into the things I’ve been saying online, reading online and offline, some more detail about me.
Overall, I think I managed to simulate a conversation with me with the entire design. Other design considerations like color, fonts, responsiveness and interactions were important but are not discussed in this article.